


Matchstick

by rosegardeninwinter



Series: The Light and the Red [1]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 11:48:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15795903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosegardeninwinter/pseuds/rosegardeninwinter
Summary: "Let’s face it; this was always how she was going to be. She would have ended up like this anyway, right? Right?"





	Matchstick

She would like to think of herself as her parents’ salvation.  


Let’s face it; this was always how she was going to be. She was born into the party life and she traipsed after her parents in shimmery chiffon as soon as she could walk and she basked in the neon and the noise. She would have ended up like this anyway, right?  


Right?  


There are cold nights, sure. Hollow nights.  


But every morning Willow wakes and washes and lays out her gowns for the evening, and as she smears vibrant red onto dead lips, she reminds herself that every caught kiss, corner, camera, candid, FRONT PAGE means that her mother and father no longer have to pretend, when they leave their children with Livia or Effie, that they are going out for dinner.  


That “the promenade was so windy tonight.”  


_Mama straightens her mussed hair and evening dress._  


That they “ate some yucky seafood.”  


_Papa scrubs his mouth until the toothpaste is red in the sink._  


“Yes, one of our friends gave Mama this necklace as thank you for coming to the party, isn’t that sweet?”  


_The Star-Crossed Lovers did make out like bandits after all._  


“Oh, no, baby girl. I’m not crying.”  


_He was. Mama was too, only Mama was better at hiding it._  


It was really lucky that at that exact moment Grandpa walked in and she and her brother were too busy kissing his cheeks and thanking him for their chocolate truffles and windup toys to care why the grown ups were sad.  


It doesn’t really matter. She’s figured it out now. And maybe it’s some consolation they were sold together. At least, the together part is consoling. But then she has to square with sold.

* * *

She hasn’t visited them yet, her parents. She should. In the past month, she’s become a wreck of the person she once was since Mama and Papa aren’t here to stop her. Not that she would have listened. They’d tried stopping her so many times before, but she was addicted to fame.  


_I’m going out, Papa, I have absolutely nothing to wear for the party next week. Of course we’ll have thirds, I’m absolutely starving! Should I wear the fluorescent or the peacock lashes to the Chariot Parade? What do you mean we can’t bet on the Games? Mama, turn the television back on!_  


Mama and Papa were so narrow minded. Times had changed. This wasn’t their generation anymore.  


She used to snatch fashion magazines from the trash can and wave them in front of her mother. “Don’t you love your own body, Mama?” she would say. “You’re on the cover of Capitol Couture!”  


“Willow, I don’t want my body on the cover of Capitol Couture. Not in my house.”  


“You don’t appreciate anything you have, do you? You have everything in the world and all you do is moan about your life — when you won’t even let me have one!”  


“Do not speak to your mother that way, young lady.”  


“You’re as bad as she is! Listen, no one cares about your tragic sob story anymore! I don’t care!”  


She’d lain awake all night, shot with adrenaline and satisfaction at her outburst. She’d pretended she couldn’t hear—then covered her head with her pillow—when the night was disrupted by Mama’s crying from down the hall.  


Big babies. Both of them.  


(The truth is, she was jealous. Her parents, famous and adored. She, just their daughter.)  


Her father’s face was the coldest she’d ever seen it at breakfast the next morning. (Her mother didn’t leave the bedroom all day. That got to her, but she wouldn’t tell them that.)  


“Willow, may we talk?”  


“No. We may not.”  


Papa had poured two cups of orange juice and returned to his room without a word. Ash stared at her, stricken, then took his breakfast outside to the garden. She sulked with her feet on the table.  


Grandpa sent her a gorgeous blue dress for Game season.  


_For my Willow. You have grown into such a beautiful and intelligent young lady. I hope you will wear this gift to my June gala. Happy Hunger Games, darling._  


Grandpa cared at least.  


She was the belle of her grandfather’s party: satin framing her figure and diamond implants rimming her eyes. No one paid her parents any attention. She loved it.  


Mama had knocked softly on her bedroom door a few hours before. Willow finished applying her makeup before she answered. Mama held a necklace extended in front of her like a peace offering.  


Willow’s fingers darted to her perfume selection, glossing over bottles until she found the one she was searching for. _Nightlock_ etched on the glass, a present from a friend. (“It’s from the Deadly Romance line, advance order!”) Mama had thrown the packaging away long ago, but it didn’t matter. The smoke wreathed lovers still smoldered at Willow from the fronts of beauty stores. The photos used to make her uncomfortable, but she’d started going out of her way to point them out because her parents hated them.  


“Not that one,” Mama pleaded. “Something fresher, please.”  


Willow smothered her neck in the come-hither aroma. She’d never actually liked this one, but spite transformed the sickly stink into a deliciously disobedient fragrance.  


Mama bowed her head. “Please try to understand. Your father and I just want you to be safe and happy.” She clasped the necklace around her daughter’s throat in the mirror. “There’s so much you don’t — ”  


“I am safe. We’re all safe. Until you see that, until you let me live the life I want to live, I won’t be happy.”  


“I’ll try to see it.” Mama’s voice was barely a whisper. “You look beautiful, baby girl.”  


* * *

Willow takes a train out to 12. They never left home in the summer but no one stops her. The woods are wet with rain and dark with the hour. She leaves her shoes by the fence and goes barefoot into the trees, cold mud squelching between her toes.  


Going to see her Mama and Papa. She didn’t deserve them; she knows this. Didn’t deserve the love that carried her to term instead of waiting for her to develop in an incubator. That guided her toddler hands to swirl paint across canvas until she was old enough to do without help. That sang her to sleep every night and never forgot her special hug. Didn’t deserve the love that dragged her away from parties, shoved and snapped at paparazzi, washed and kissed the coats of makeup from her face and tried, tried, tried to make her see sense.  


Mama, the lingering meadow lullaby in her dreams.  


Papa, a fleeting splash of sunset over the city sky.  


The stone is mossy and she goes to brush it away. But maybe Mama and Papa would want to be concealed. So she changes her mind and leaves the moss.  


The night of her grandfather’s June gala she was drunk on abandon, sloshing wine all over white carpet, unaware that only five floors below her, bullets were spattering Mama and Papa’s blood all over white walls.  


The house was empty when the car brought Willow and Ash home, which could have tipped her off, except Mama and Papa stayed out late a lot. They would send for the car when they were ready to come back. She was pouring herself some hot chocolate when the clock struck two in the morning. Ash was pacing. (Obedient, understanding Ash. He’d never snapped at them. He’d never questioned their family rules. He was always the first to hear when they had nightmares. Always the first—only, often—to climb into their bed and into their arms.)  


“Do you think we should call, Lil? It’s getting really late.”  


Grandpa had arrived two minutes later and the stricken look on his face told her everything before he opened his mouth. She would find her mug smashed on the floor later. She didn’t even remember dropping it.  


The hospital beds were covered. The nurses were grim. She remembers Ash screaming. She thinks they gave him a sedative, afraid he’d hurt himself. She doesn’t really know.  


She couldn’t feel.  


She’d sat in a chair by her father’s bed and watched Ash, crumpled against their mother’s, his sobbing the only sound in the room. Absently she pinched her fingers around one of the diamond implants and pulled hard, dribbling blood down her cheek. She has a scar there now, just under her eye.  


Apparently the implants were supposed to be removed surgically.  


The news reports blamed district anarchists for the deaths, but she knows. Grandpa Snow didn’t need Mama and Papa anymore, not when the Capitol had a new source of distraction: her. Gasoline ignites fires. He didn’t want fires. He disposed of the gasoline. Makes sense, really, with the benefit of hindsight.  


Ash came home with a big bottle of liquor. Dealing with it like Uncle Haymitch would. She shut herself in Mama and Papa’s room. Not sleeping. She didn’t sleep for days, just sat on the edge of their bed, counting the hours by the fluctuation of sunlight and streetlight through the curtains. Not eating, although Ash did set a half eaten platter of cake on the side table for her. Thinking. In time she stops thinking too.  


* * *

The funeral was televised. The Capitol doctors grafted the ruptured bone of Mama and Papa’s skulls back on and airbrushed their faces. The Star-Crossed Lovers could be nothing but aesthetically perfect, right to the last, when guards lifted the black silk in which the bodies were draped and let the attendees sprinkle them with rose petals.  


That was a month ago.  


That was a month ago. The Reaping is soon. Uncle Haymitch ought to visit, but there’s been no word from him since the funeral.   


Maybe they’re happier now. Now that they don’t have to pretend.  


She allows her fingers to dance over the grave marker: blank, but she thinks they’d like that. The bodies were burned in somber ceremony, the ashes mingled in a plain vase. It was in one of her brother’s better moments that she convinced him to come with her to the woods to bury it with a box of treasures (a few pictures, a piece of Papa’s apron, a pressed yellow weed) under an unassuming rock.  


“I miss you, Mama, Papa,” she whispers, so faintly she’s not sure it passes her lips.  


She pretends that the sudden increase in the bitter wind is somehow an answer. If it is, it seems like a scold.  


“I’m sorry.”  


Then she turns and sprints out of the forest. Back to cleaning up Ash’s vomit from the toilet rim, back to secrets and lies, back to that nauseating, magnetizing flurry of light — back, back, back.  


Not here. Haunting their ghosts with everything they tried to escape.  


She likes to think of herself as her parents’ salvation, because it lets her forget that, more or less, she murdered them.


End file.
